The statistics have proven that in emergency situations, many people are given improper medical treatment due to a lack of knowledge or misunderstanding of a person's medical history. A person may be unconscious or in such a state that asking detailed medical questions would be futile. Information about a person such as allergies and diabetes could be vital to prompt and proper treatment. Emergency personnel, and treating physicians may therefore lack important medical conditions of a person and the treatment may complicate matters or be fatal.
In addition to medical conditions, it is equally important to know the type of prescription medications that a person may be taking. There are a number of prescriptions that conflict such that the result could effectively cancel each other or in some instances the resulting conflict could be dangerous.
There have been many attempts to provide a patient with some mechanism to indicate important medical conditions or medications. Certain jewelry items can include limited inform at ion such as name, emergency telephone numbers and some very basic health status indicators. Not only is the amount of information limited, but it is visible to anyone, thereby making a person's confidential medical and personal data publicly available.
There are other medical data mechanisms that list certain detailed information on emergency cards. However these cards may be hidden away in a wallet or purse and it may be difficult to locate. It also may look inappropriate for emergency personnel to be digging through the wallet of an unconscious person.
Another system recognizes the confidential nature of the medical information and provides codes and/or passwords to emergency personnel and requires the emergency responders to access a third party and relay the codes or passwords in order to find out the details of the person's medical information. There would be a potentially life-threatening delay in such a process and it requires the personnel to use a form of communications that may not be accessible.
There are also some implementations that incorporate microprocessors and electronics to store the medical data and require some mechanism to interface with the stored data. Such a system adds cost, and complexity as well as a power source. In addition, electronics are susceptible to damage, especially if worn on a person. There are other systems that implant medical data within the person however some consider these systems to be intrusive and undesirable.
What is needed, therefore, is some system of providing medical data to those personnel that require it. There needs to be a way to capture enough information to be useful to the end-user and not merely contact data. The data should be in a format that maintains the confidential nature of the medical data and not easily discernable to everyone. And, the data should be presented in a manner that is easy to locate and easy to find.